Monthly Archives: September 2018

2016 election, Donald Trump

Get ready for a serious ‘witch hunt’

Donald John Trump has been calling a detailed investigation into possible collusion with Russian operatives seeking to influence the 2016 presidential election a “rigged witch hunt.”

Of course … special counsel Robert Mueller’s exhaustive and meticulous investigation is no such thing.

However, we might be getting ready to watch the real thing unfold. A serious witch hunt emanating from within the White House as an enraged president seeks to find the identity of the “senior White House official” who wrote an op-ed column published today in The New York Times.

Of course, I have no way of knowing this, but I strongly suspect that Trump has released the proverbial hounds to find the source of the essay. He or White House chief of staff John Kelly will confront everyone they can imagine who might have written such a thing; my money is on Kelly doing the heavy lift, given the president’s inability/unwillingness to confront someone directly.

However, I am quite sure we’re going to witness a serious “witch hunt” that seeks to reveal who has spoken a truth about the Trump administration that many of us have suspected all along.

Donald Trump, national news, political news

Jeb Bush was right: We got ‘chaos’

Jeb Bush ran against Donald Trump for the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary. That said, what’s coming next isn’t an original thought from me; I heard it come from someone else, but I’ll offer it anyway.

It is that Jeb Bush told us that Trump’s presidential candidacy was rife with “chaos” and that he would be a chaotic president if the nation lost its mind and elected him.

Jeb was right! He was more right than many of us imagined at the time.

Sure, the former Florida governor became the butt of insults from Trump while the men competed for the GOP nomination. However, I’ll be danged if he didn’t call it exactly right.

Here’s the thing, though: “Chaos” now seems to be among the tamest things we can say about Trump’s administration. More chilling descriptions are emerging: unhinged, frightening, threat to national security.

Surely, we are witnessing our share of chaos, confusion and controversy from the Trump administration. Every single day produces something new. Every day we see the president swirling in the maelstrom of tumult.

Frankly, I am amazed that Jeb Bush hasn’t gotten the credit — until now! — for the prescience he exhibited while campaigning against Donald Trump.

political news, State news

Flag burning becomes Senate issue … oh, boy!

I kind of expected this to happen. Flag burning has been introduced as an issue in the race for the U.S. Senate in Texas.  Except that it’s been distorted to something that bears no resemblance to what was actually said.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican incumbent, has accused Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke of favoring the burning of the Stars and Stripes as a form of political protest.

Oops! O’Rourke didn’t say such a thing, as the Texas Tribune has reported.

It seems that O’Rourke was asked at a town hall meeting to discuss political protest and, in particular, the landmark 1989 Texas v. Johnson U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared flag burning to be a legitimate form of political protest.

O’Rourke gave a lengthy, long-winded answer to a question, but didn’t actually endorse flag burning. The Cruz campaign cherry-picked a portion of O’Rourke’s answer and linked it to flag burning, rather than to the broader issues that O’Rourke addressed in his town hall response.

Read the Tribune’s explanation here.

I fear this is the kind of thing we can expect in this campaign, which appears to be much closer than the Cruz Missile and the Texas Republican Party ever expected it to become. O’Rourke — a congressman from El Paso — has drawn essentially even with Cruz. He is campaigning in all 254 Texas counties, even in those rural counties where he figures to get clobbered by Republican voters.

As for whether he supports flag burning as a form of political protest, I think I can discern O’Rourke’s view, which well might mirror my own: I understand the act to be a legitimate form of political protest, but just don’t do it in front of me if you expect me to be swayed to whatever point you’re trying to make.

national news

The author is no mid-level WH chump … bet on it!

I feel like sharing this tweet from a leading Washington, D.C., journalist.

So, here is what Karen Tumulty writes: My 2 cents: It is hard to imagine the NYT would have given anonymity on something like this to someone who was not at least as high as a cabinet secretary or assistant to the president.

Whoever wrote the essay that appeared today in The New York Times is no mid-level staffer. He or she very likely is someone with direct daily access to Donald John Trump.

I don’t yet know where all this is going. Much of it will depend on whether the president learns who it is. And what he’ll do about it. Does he fire the individual on the spot and thus, expose that person’s identity to the world?

Read the essay here.

I’ve read this op-ed column twice. I suspect it’s going to be an even better read the more I read it.

As for Tumulty’s belief about the NY Times’s decision to run this piece without attribution, a newspaper of such stature and standing doesn’t dare hand out this space without ironclad knowledge that the author knows of which he or she is writing.

Donald Trump

When does POTUS become too much of a ‘distraction’?

You hear it all the time from public officials who get embroiled in public controversy or scandal, if you wish to call it that.

“I don’t want to become a distraction,” they say. “Being such a distraction makes it impossible for me to do my job. Therefore, I resign from this office to make way for public policy to continue without these other side issues swirling around.”

With that, I believe it’s fair to ask: When does a president of the United States of America himself become too much of a “distraction” for his agenda?

Let me say this straight up and straight out: I do not believe Donald J. Trump is going to resign. Nor do I believe he should quit … at least not yet.

A man nominated to join the U.S. Supreme Court testified today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. That’s a huge deal, yes? Then, kaboom! The New York Times publishes an anonymously written op-ed from a senior White House official saying that he or she is part of a team effort to protect the United States from the president’s more dangerous impulses.

This essay comes directly on the heels of a preview of a book, “Fear,” written by The Washington Post legendary Bob Woodward, that speaks to the interminable chaos, confusion and, yes, “fear” within the White House.

How does the president govern with all these, um, “distractions” threatening to swallow him whole.

President Johnson said on March 31, 1968 that he could not put his own political future ahead of the issues troubling the nation; he told the nation that “I will not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Six years later, President Nixon spoke of distraction, too, as he tendered his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He couldn’t govern. He couldn’t move any legislative priorities forward.

What is the threshold? Where does it rest? When do these “distractions” become too much even for a president who calls himself a “stable genius” and a self-proclaimed expert on every issue known to the presidency?

These are questions that well might begin to boil to the top of the public discourse over what we’re witnessing in real time.

media news

Anonymity produces courage

A mentor of mine, a fellow who gave me my first job in daily journalism, once said that newspaper readers have the right to judge what people said in opinion pieces against those who write them.

In other words, anonymity was a non-starter.

So, the New York Times today has just upset that norm. It has published an op-ed column by a “senior White House official” that declares that the White House staff’s first order of business is to protect the nation from Donald Trump’s more dangerous impulses.

Are we now going to dismiss this officials dire warning merely because he or she didn’t put a name on the piece that the NY Times has just published?

I’m not ready to do that.

Read the essay here.

Over the years I edited opinion pages in Oregon and in Texas, I rejected many requests for anonymity. Most people who wanted me to shield their identity was because they would be embarrassed by what they had to say. That wasn’t good enough. I usually didn’t hesitate telling them so. Yes, there are exceptions: rape or incest victims come to mind; I didn’t get any such requests during my nearly four decades in journalism.

The individual who has written this piece for the NYT appears to be motivated by a high calling. This individual doesn’t want to lose his or her job and believes that staying on the job is vital to continuing to protect the nation against the president’s nuttier notions.

Still, having said all that, I wish the individual who wrote essay this would have put a name on the essay. He or she would have lost a job, but there would be others at their respective posts who would remain faithful to the mission of protecting the United States against the president of the United States.

Think of how strange it is that we’re even having this discussion.

Weird.

political news

Trump wants to ban dissent? Really?

I have a three-letter response to what I understand Donald J. Trump said in the White House today.

Wow!

Trump told the Daily Caller — and I hope you’re sitting down when you read this — according to The Washington Post: “I don’t know why they don’t take care of a situation like that,” Trump said. “I think it’s embarrassing for the country to allow protesters. You don’t even know what side the protesters are on.”

He added: “In the old days, we used to throw them out. Today, I guess they just keep screaming.”

Embarrassing for the country to allow protesters? Yep. He said it.

He clearly needs to read the U.S. Constitution, the document he took an oath to protect and defend. It lays out in the Bill of Rights that citizens are entitled to protest.

In fact, and this is no small point, the nation was founded by a band of protesters who came to this new land to protest things such as political and religious oppression.

Political protest is as American as it gets, Mr. President.

Really. It is!

If the president is discussing the unruliness of those who are yelling at U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee members and U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, I agree that they shouldn’t be allowed to disrupt a hearing. They are being “thrown out” of the hearing room by congressional security officers.

But to ban political protest? I say again: Wow!

national news

Waiting to read this blockbuster book

I’ll admit it. I couldn’t wait until Christmas to get a copy of “Fear,” the latest book by esteemed journalist Bob Woodward.

My son and daughter-in-law had given me a Father’s Day gift card from Amazon, which I redeemed this morning. The book will be on its way to my house once it is released on Sept. 11.

There is so much to digest, so much to ponder, according to the excerpts that have been released for public review. Here’s one tidbit, as expressed in a Twitter message put out by U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.: Trump’s previous personal lawyer was convinced would commit perjury if he talked to Mueller. Let that sink in.

It is sinking in as I write this brief blog post. It gives me a much clearer understanding on why John Dowd, the aforementioned “previous personal lawyer,” turned in his resignation as Trump’s lawyer. He couldn’t represent a client who would be prone to lying, even under oath, where he swears to tell “the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“Mueller,” of course, is Robert Mueller, the special counsel who at this moment remains up to his eyeballs in trying to determine whether the 2016 Trump campaign “colluded” with Russian goons who attacked our electoral system.

For the president’s former personal counsel to suggest he had no faith in his client’s ability to tell Mueller the truth is, um, shall we say, shocking in the extreme.

As it is frightening.

media news, national news

There can be no doubt: POTUS is a danger to the nation

1 Comment

I hereby declare my implicit trust in the veracity of a book that’s about to hit the shelves across the nation.

Bob Woodward has written a tell-all book titled “Fear” that details what others have said, have written that Donald J. Trump is a threat to the nation’s security.

Imagine that. I never thought in a million years I would be concurring with such an assertion about the president of the United States of America.

My bigger point, though, is that Woodward’s work has become legendary in the world of print journalism. The man is known as a meticulous gatherer of information. He uses multiple sources before putting something into print. He takes contemporaneous notes. He makes recordings.

And yet, we hear from the White House — including from the president — that Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is making things up.

This man built his entire reputation on a record of accuracy and credibility.

I remain steadfast in my belief that he is telling us the truth about the White House in a state of near panic. Chief staff members cannot conceive of a president being so unaware, so non-inquisitive, so uncaring about the details of foreign or domestic policy.

Think, too, about the idea that the president would blurt out some idiotic notion of assassinating the leader of a sovereign nation, which is what he reportedly did regarding Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.

Perhaps most shocking is that Donald “Stable Genius” Trump had to ask why the United States maintains a military presence in South Korea, to which Defense Secretary James Mattis reminded him that the U.S. forces are there to “prevent World War III.”

Frightening … in the extreme!

national news

How will we remember POTUS No. 45?

They have laid John McCain to rest at the U.S. Naval Academy.

The late U.S. senator’s farewell was fitting in every way imaginable. One of the eulogies given in honor of the Arizona Republican accompanies this blog post.

I know others have thought — or perhaps even said it out loud — the question I am about to pose: How is the nation going to remember the current occupant of the White House?

I am trying to imagine someone standing in a church pulpit, be he or she a Democrat or Republican, saying the kinds of things about the current president that were said about Sen. McCain.

It’s remarkable that to me that such respect, admiration would come from leaders of both major parties. They all said essentially the same thing about Sen. McCain: agree or disagree with him, the full measure of this man cannot be quantified in simply political terms. As President Obama noted during his eulogy to Sen. McCain, he was “prepared to die” in service to this country.

I want to bring the current president into this discussion because I know — and you know it, too — that others have thought to themselves about how POTUS No. 45 is going to be remembered when the time comes for us to say farewell.

I am one American who cannot wrap my arms around such a thing.